Aboriginal societies Tutorial 1: Prepare and discuss...

Aboriginal societies are at their fullest potential when uncomplicated and crude. From this statement we can assume that foreigners should not have entered Australia, for many of the Aboriginal societies took their footsteps toward modernization. We may also assume that being undeveloped does not necessarily mean 'bad'. My opinion is that to a large extent, Aboriginal societies are best at their simplistic and primitive state. Perhaps, it had been a wrong move for Aborigines to travel towards modernization, for at their current state, with more than a hundred different languages in the Northern region alone, in order for trade and widespread of social network, Aborigines had to be multilingual to allow communication between each region. An Arrernte, the original indigenous Australian Aborigines who lived in the centre area of Australia around Mparntwe or Alice Spring, could speak up to ten lanugages! Many people in our society today tries to learn more than three languages. However, those who learnt up to three or more were minute in quantity and rare. However, in just the Arrernte group alone, most of the group members would knew how to speak ten or more languages (Note, it is languages, not dialects). Certainly this had a lot to do with the Aboriginal culture of wide social network and the fact that there were no translators during the under-developed period. Unlike today, where people can recruit translators or simply use the internet's translators to help finish their work, Australian Aboriginal did not have the technology. Therefore everyone had to help themselves. Should they not work hard enough, they will be eliminated. Aboriginal societies are best left primitive and simplistic. From the 1800s to the 1900s, and even earlier than that, many conflicts occured between the Europeans and the Aborigines. Since the records were available, Aborigines were killed in injustice by the Europeans as Europeans believed that they were superior compared to the Aborigines, ignoring the fact that everyone is equal. Many a times it was very obvious that the European Superior Court was biased against Aborigines. Conflicts started by Europeans turned into a massacre of Aborigines as Europeans have better technology and weapons. Lots of massacre occurred during the 19th century. Bathurst massacre, Cape Grim massacre (Where few shepherds used their guns and killed 30 over Aborigines.); Official Punishment raids by the government in 1830; Convincing Ground massacre (Dispute over a bleached whale) and many others more. The figures in these few massacre alone is depressing. [1][2][3] However, we could not be confirmed that Aborigines are best left simplistic. For instance, Aborigines lived nomadic lives and had no permanent homes. The

introduction of seeds, plows, and many technologies allowed the Aborigines to have sufficient food for living. Living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is very risky as well. A mistake while hunting could cause their life to end. Yet should they had reared up animals instead, they could easily obtain food that is safe. Aboriginal hunt rates, even when both males and females participate, was at a rate of 41%. On the other hand, as long as the weather conditions are pleasant, there is no drought or any natural disasters such as heatwaves, the crops would stay safe and they would obtain a nearly 100% rate of harvest, with a greater amount. There is an overkill hypothesis - huntersgatherers societies may have killed too much, causing the extinction of many animal species. This hypothesis was thought up by Jared Diamond, and indeed, many parts of the North America had lost its original inhabitants, the large mammalian species that had became extinct due to overexploitation of human beings. It would be unfair for us to judge that the invasion of Europeans caused disasters for the Aborigines. For example, during 1932 - 1934, there was a series of killing at Caledon Bay in the Northern Territory of Australia. Members of a Japanese fishing boat crew abducted and raped a group of Yolngu women. When the Yolngu men came to rescue the women, five of the boat's crew were killed. In a related incident, two white men lost their lives as well. A policeman investigating the deaths, Constable Albert McColl, was also murdered by the Yolngu people. According to witnesses, he had hand cuffed a Yolngu woman and shot the woman's husband who responded to her cries of help. The killings triggered panic in Darwin, generating fears that the Aborigines might stage a riot. A punitive expedition was propoced by the police to 'teach the blacks a lesson' since during 1928, there was a punitive expedition which resulted in 110 lives of Aboriginal men, women and children. (The Coniston massacre) The crisis would have brought more bloodshed should Donald Thomson had not offered to investigate the causes of the conflict. The results were that he managed to persuade the Federal Government to free the three convicts who were innocent and documented their culture, after living for over a year with the Aborigines. In 1941, he persuade the Army to establish a Special Reconnaissance Force of Yolngu men to repel Japanese raids on the northern coastlines of Australia. This, was the decisive moment in the history of Aboriginal-European relations. This accident offered a new life for the Aborigines. I am very sure that many more of these kinds of accidents occured and changed the Aboriginal-European relations, bringing positive changes to the Aboriginal Society. [4] Despite the fact that the invasion of the Europeans into the Aboriginal society has brought them cultural improvement, I still believe that Aboriginal societies are best left simplistic though modernization has brought them sufficient food for the society as

this modernization has also brought in pollution to this untouched part of human

societies. Moreover, it has brought in diseases that are foreign to their land, leading to more deaths. The soil erosion that the immense plowing and repeated over-farming has caused the soil to be infertile and barren. The nutrients from the fertilizers caused the water to be polluted and caused algae bloom in rivers, wiping out species home to the river. Not only that, for Aboriginal societies are small in our standard today around 40 people. The introduction of domestic farming had caused many societies to be nucleated together. In a sense, they are not Aborigines anymore. Even though the relationship between Aboriginal-European has been improved, the deaths of the Aborigines; the families destroyed had left deep scar in the hearts of the Aborigines. The foreign viruses and bacteria that the Europeans brought in killed many of the Aborigines. The number of women that they had raped, the children they had killed, the men they had perhaps enslaved and tortured -This people had lost their lives due to the injustice and no one will ever know. The holes that they had made, the Europeans will never be able to fill it up again. Therefore, I agree to a large extent that Aboriginal societies are best left simplistic as modernization had changed their simple lives forever and the conflicts between the European and them had caused their number to deplete even further. Europeans may have brought in technology and domestication; however, it also brought in disaster, chaos and diseases - all which led to the downfall of the Aborigines. Bibliography: Source 1:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenous_Australians

Source 2:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Grim_massacre

Source 3:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convincing_Ground_massacre

Source 4:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caledon_Bay_crisis